MEDICAL PRACTICE
Digestive Center For Wellness
I’m Dr. Robynne Chutkan, a gastroenterologist educated at Yale and Columbia and the author of 4 bestselling books on digestive health. I’ve been a practicing gastroenterologist on the faculty at Georgetown University Hospital for over 25 years, and you can find out more about me HERE.
My Medical Practice
In 2004 I founded the Digestive Center for Wellness (DCW), an integrative gastroenterology practice located in Washington DC, to provide answers to a critical health question: why? Why is your gut inflamed? Why do you have bacterial overgrowth? Why did you develop Crohn’s? Why are you bloated? My goal is to try and uncover the root cause of your digestive distress and find integrative solutions to heal your gut, instead of relying on pharmaceutical quick fixes with undesirable side effects that don’t always provide lasting relief.
DCW has been my clinical lab for almost 2 decades, allowing me to deliver innovative care to thousands of patients, while developing effective treatment protocols for common GI complaints like constipation and heartburn; emerging conditions like leaky gut and SIBO; and complex autoimmune diseases like Crohn’s and ulcerative colitis.
My Approach
One of my passions is helping people with inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) get their symptoms into remission without the use of immunosuppressive agents like steroids or biologics. In addition to IBD, I treat patients with a wide range of digestive disorders, from mild bowel irregularity to serious diseases like colon cancer. Many of my treatment pathways focus on rehabilitating the gut microbiome through diet and lifestyle modifications, but I am not a functional medicine practitioner, and my focus is strictly on digestive disorders.
I believe in a “food as medicine”approach and try to avoid prescribing drugs whenever possible. When medication is unavoidable, I usually recommend a “bottom up” approach where I start with the least toxic option and work my way up from there – always in combination with a thoughtful look at nutritional needs and habits.